A Good Look at the Role of the Kochtopus in the Fight to Dismantle Net Metering

The obsolete, but heavily subsidized fossil fuel and nuclear power industry is reaching into state government to roll back the emerging US electrical renaissance. Some of the major agents of this effort are fossil fuel dealers David and Charles Koch. Many bloggers have begun referring to their political operation as “the Kochtopus,” reflecting the many front groups that the Kochs have put at the service of the electrical system’s current oligarchic regime, as well as oligarchs in other industries.

But the term harks back to the great novel The Octopus, by Frank Norris, about the strangle hold the Southern Pacific Railroad held over farmers in the emerging agribusiness system who were too dependent on growing wheat for market at the beginning of the twentieth century. Norris saw the threat of oligarchic control of the US then, just as we are seeing the fossil fuel industry, along with its nuclear powered cousin, fighting to stamp out innovation and citizen control of our electrical system.

New film “Koch Brothers Exposed 2014 Edition” available free on line at http://www.bravenewfilms.org/koch2014 . They have the trailer and they ask for donations but you can watch the film at this web site without donating.